@davidclowery: Six Real Problems in Music Business the Obama DOJ Should be Investigating

The Department of Justice has indicated that it views the fact that a tiny percentage of songwriters can refuse to license their songs to monopoly digital services as an existential threat to competition in the digital music marketplace.

Huh??!!

This is some spectacular through-the-looking-glass thinking right there. The kind of mass-hysteria-groupthink you can only get when the entire government is run by lawyers that all went to one of four elite copyleft law schools. It takes a special kind of arrogance that only a Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Berkeley law degree gives you to not ask: Aren’t the monopoly digital services actually the real threats to competition? And hasn’t the DOJ by forcing virtually all songwriters to license their songs to these services at below market rates created monopsonies that are driving consolidation among music publishers? Aren’t the actions of DOJ antitrust lawyers killing competition rather than enhancing it?

But that all presupposes that the Department of Justice is in the business of meting out justice and protecting the little guy rather than protecting a few politically favored corporations. To illustrate I’ve come up with 6 real pressing problems that a Department of Justice that was interested in justice would pursue.